Microsoft Trying To Kill HDD Boot Drives By 2023, Report Says (tomshardware.com) 214
A recent executive brief from data storage industry analyst firm Trendfocus reports that OEMs have disclosed that Microsoft is pushing them to drop HDDs as the primary storage device in pre-built Windows 11 PCs and use SSDs instead, with the current deadlines for the switchover set for 2023. Tom's Hardware reports: Interestingly, these actions from Microsoft come without any firm SSD requirement listed for Windows 11 PCs, and OEMs have pushed back on the deadlines. [...] Microsoft's most current(opens in new tab) list of hardware requirements calls for a '64 GB or larger storage device' for Windows 11, so an SSD isn't a minimum requirement for a standard install. However, Microsoft stipulates that two features, DirectStorage and the Windows Subsystem for Android(opens in new tab), require an SSD, but you don't have to use those features. It is unclear whether or not Microsoft plans to change the minimum specifications for Windows 11 PCs after the 2023 switchover to SSDs for pre-built systems.
As always, the issue with switching all systems to SSDs boils down to cost: Trendfocus Vice President John Chen tells us that replacing a 1TB HDD requires stepping down to a low-cost 256 GB SSD, which OEMs don't consider to be enough capacity for most users. Conversely, stepping up to a 512 GB SSD would 'break the budget' for lower-end machines with a strict price limit. "The original cut-in date based on our discussions with OEMs was to be this year, but it has been pushed out to sometime next year (the second half, I believe, but not clear on the firm date)," Chen told Tom's Hardware. "OEMs are trying to negotiate some level of push out (emerging market transition in 2024, or desktop transition in 2024), but things are still in flux."
The majority of PCs in developed markets have already transitioned to SSDs for boot drives, but there are exceptions. Chen notes that it is possible that Microsoft could make some exceptions, but the firm predicts that dual-drive desktop PCs and gaming laptops with both an SSD for the boot drive and an HDD for bulk storage will be the only mass-market PCs with an HDD. [...] It's unclear what measures, if any, Microsoft would take with OEMs if they don't comply with its wishes, and the company has decided not to comment on the matter. Trendfocus says the switchover will have implications for HDD demand next year.
As always, the issue with switching all systems to SSDs boils down to cost: Trendfocus Vice President John Chen tells us that replacing a 1TB HDD requires stepping down to a low-cost 256 GB SSD, which OEMs don't consider to be enough capacity for most users. Conversely, stepping up to a 512 GB SSD would 'break the budget' for lower-end machines with a strict price limit. "The original cut-in date based on our discussions with OEMs was to be this year, but it has been pushed out to sometime next year (the second half, I believe, but not clear on the firm date)," Chen told Tom's Hardware. "OEMs are trying to negotiate some level of push out (emerging market transition in 2024, or desktop transition in 2024), but things are still in flux."
The majority of PCs in developed markets have already transitioned to SSDs for boot drives, but there are exceptions. Chen notes that it is possible that Microsoft could make some exceptions, but the firm predicts that dual-drive desktop PCs and gaming laptops with both an SSD for the boot drive and an HDD for bulk storage will be the only mass-market PCs with an HDD. [...] It's unclear what measures, if any, Microsoft would take with OEMs if they don't comply with its wishes, and the company has decided not to comment on the matter. Trendfocus says the switchover will have implications for HDD demand next year.
Good and 256 is just fine. (Score:3, Informative)
If you have 150GB+ of media you must have internal access to or are doing lot's of gaming or media creation you are likely already spending more on a system anyways.
This is just companies concerned about older people and the non-techie who are still in the time when big storage mattered. Even this week I had to recommend a laptop for my mother and when I tell my dad the hard drive was 512GB he says "is that enough" even though I know neither of them are using more than 100GB on anything.
At this point selling someone a non-SSD boot drive really is doing your customer a disservice no matter the price.
Re: Good and 256 is just fine. (Score:3, Funny)
Re: Good and 256 is just fine. (Score:5, Informative)
C'mon my brother, I can pretty assuredly say 80% of people in the sub 700 windows laptop market don't know what any of that means.
Re: Good and 256 is just fine. (Score:3)
Not everyone using a PC will use office or a number of the other common bloat stuff. All I might want is a PC that runs a web browser in kiosk mode where I don't care if the disk is slow. For all that matters it might even boot from a CD or other read only device and use a RAM disk then.
No point in setting minimum requirements, just warn the user that the performance might suffer.
256 is NOT enough for Windows (Score:3)
Windows update consumes more and more space. It easily clobbers 64 gig over a few years. And it is getting bigger and bigger.
90% of windows users do use Office et. al.
A large hard disk with a small SSD cache is probably the best. Users do not have to manage the space, worry about different drives. And the stuff that is actually used lives in the SSD cache.
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Windows update consumes more and more space. It easily clobbers 64 gig over a few years. And it is getting bigger and bigger.
Windows update does not use that much space anymore, especially not since Image Cleanup and old updates cleanup are things - 200 GB is still more than enough for casual use. In any event, it's expected to need to backup your documents and Refresh the entire system every 4 or 5 years with a clean install of Windows.
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Consider a 100 GB local cache quota if you're using Outlook and require backup and discovery retention. Numerous require Visual Studio, plus one note local client cache and other 1 GB software patches, and 240 GB is quickly drained. Thus, 512 GB should be a minimum starting point.
Your use case is not befitting of the budget laptops we are talking about. /Disclaimer: Posted from an old Surface with a 128GB drive that works just fine. I don't run Visual Studio or have 100GB of emails just like 99.9% of other users, and my massive porn collection can live on a USB drive.
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Consider a 100 GB local cache quota if you're using Outlook and require backup and discovery retention.
If you have retention policies and genuinely care about discovery, you do not allow users to have 100GB mailboxes.
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Consider a 100 GB local cache quota if you're using Outlook and require backup and discovery retention.
These extra storage concerns are only for Business computers belonging to an organization, and if that's the case, then your IT department should be making a decision based on your actual requirements. Similarly if you are a Software Developer, it should be no surprise you need a system that meets requirements above the bare minimums.
the system requirements are the Bare minimum for casual personal use,
Re:Good and 256 is just fine. (Score:4, Interesting)
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They will buy the computer the guy at their local computer store sells them, and Microsoft will put all their stuff in the cloud and they'll be none the wiser.
Until Microsoft starts demanding money for access to their grandkid's photos. Then they worry.
Re:Good and 256 is just fine. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good and 256 is just fine. (Score:4, Insightful)
The speed difference in booting can't be that important to them, can it?
A user who buys a device with an HDD boot device isn't going to have the aptitude to know that they should be blaming the cheapo manufacturer - to them it just looks like Windows is slow and takes forever to load. It's going to be a lot more tempting for them to spend a few hundred bucks more next time to buy the super snappy MacBook they tried out at the Apple store.
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Also, for data hoarders like me. I don't want to have external drives to carry around. I only use them for storages like back ups.
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Also, for data hoarders like me. I don't want to have external drives to carry around
The minimum requirements aren't for data hoarders.. you should obviously get a laptop that has room in it to fit a bulk storage device in addition to your fast boot device, Or Glue your external disk to the top of your laptop on the outside or use rubber-bands to attach your portable hard drive to your laptop's power adapter so you no longer have to carry it around as a separate thing.
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Big Storage DOES matter, but fast storage rarely matters for budget machines. 1TB external USB drives are dime a dozen these days. Perfect for your kinky video collection.
And if you do require this size storage for actual ongoing work then maybe a budget machine isn't for you.
Also I agree, Fuck the Cloud. I run my OwnCloud on a little NAS, it was quite trivial to setup. No need to do something as archaic as keep files on my laptop.
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Yes it does matter. But then again, if you need big storage you almost certainly want to invest into a NAS in either case. At the beginning this can be a Raspberry Pi 4 with a 4 TB SATA HDD connected to it, but you definitely want to move on from there. RAID is pretty much dead at this stage, just go with BTRFS or ZFS instead, and just accept HDDs are slow MOFOs.
This, of course, requires some knowledge of what you're doing. Big storage in desktops is pretty much dead though, 2TB+ is just not necessary. Heck
Re:Good and 256 is just fine. (Score:5, Informative)
Big storage in desktops is pretty much dead though, 2TB+ is just not necessary. Heck, *I* am a power user and gamer and I only use around 800 GB right now.
A handful of AAA games will use up 800GB by themselves...
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But for most storage and archival usages, a big HDD is a better choice than a smaller SSD. Unless you are doing something like video editing, or music with large orchestral sample libraries, you don't need a massive SSD, unless you're on a laptop with only space for one drive. The laptop I'm writing this on has a 1TB SATA SSD; my newest music PC has 2x2TB nvme by comparison.
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If you don't trust the cloud, then use an external USB 3.2 hard drive.
This is quite a bit better than loading up Internal storage devices - which are with increasing frequency being Soldered onto the board, and more and more often Encrypted by default in a manner that is tied to a T2 chip on the Motherboard or a cloud-held recovery key (Originally Windows 11 was actually going to have this Secure Boot enabled as a Boot requirement for Windows 11 to even boot), so basically if your system Pukes:
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My brother. You're swimming upstream against the more is better Veblen crowd... good luck with your uncommon sense.
Re:Good and 256 is just fine. (Score:5, Insightful)
There are plenty of games out there right now that are more than 150G alone. So.. No.
ARK: Survival Involved with some mods and all DLC clocks in at 320GB.
And as for media, I guess you don't have (grand)parents that love sending you 100's of MBs of pictures. It adds up.
And then there's Windows itself, which, despite all kinds of 'cleanup' options nowadays just grows bigger and bigger while in use.
512 might be enough for a Facebook user, but 256 isn't enough for anyone.
Re: Good and 256 is just fine. (Score:2)
That's a bit of my point though, people shopping for the bottom barrel machines, (which in my opinion is anything that is still booting off a spinning disk new on shelves in 2022) are probably 80-90% "Facebook users" and the fact that some unknowing buyer is still getting a 5400rpm platter drive to run a modern system so the HP's out there can skim a bit more margin for awhile is just bad.
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Oh I don't disagree. But 1TB would be the minimum for a large amount of people and uses nowadays.
And those SSDs are not cheap. But yeah, bottom of the barrel stuff is always going to be... Less than ideal. For obvious reasons :D
The thing that annoys me however is Microsoft trying to force this change. Instead of actually making their OS performant, you're just forced to use better hardware. Reminds me of the java development I was confronted with for 2 decades. "Just use more RAM!".
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And those SSDs are not cheap
Even the basic $699 Dell Inspiron defaults to a 512GB SSD, the things are damn cheap these days.
The thing that annoys me however is Microsoft trying to force this change. Instead of actually making their OS performant, you're just forced to use better hardware.
Well you need to access the contents of the disk and store it somewhere so you either need lots of RAM to store the OS and the running (or cache the often-run applications) or you need fast storage. The average 5400rpm hard drive performs crap whether you're running Windows or Linux and as for macOS Apple made this change long ago.
If there really is a market for bottom-of-the-barrel laptops so cheap that you need
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Instead of actually making their OS performant, you're just forced to use better hardware
All 2.5" drives from the major manufacturers use SMR now. Even if Windows stayed the same, hard drives are getting slower - especially for writes.
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For a while I was actually running my Steam drive off an iSCSI drive on a network mounth and it worked surprisingly well.
Granted with Ark I had time to go put a coffee on while it booted up a map, but once up, it ran just fine.
That said with the new machine and 4T of nvme SSD it loads extra fast indeed.
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For a while I was actually running my Steam drive off an iSCSI drive on a network mounth and it worked surprisingly well.
Granted with Ark I had time to go put a coffee on while it booted up a map, but once up, it ran just fine.
That said with the new machine and 4T of nvme SSD it loads extra fast indeed.
Get yourself 2 smallish SSDs that you may have liying around, and configure them as R/W SSD cache on your NAS, While the first load of the map of the day will still be slowish, the difference on tasks like Saving a game, restoring from save, and re-loading a map, is remarkable. While bigger is better, there is a point of diminishing returns (use case based) and remeber that each Gig of SSD cache requires RAM, so take that into account.
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There are plenty of games out there right now that are more than 150G alone. So.. No.
ARK: Survival Involved with some mods and all DLC clocks in at 320GB.
And as for media, I guess you don't have (grand)parents that love sending you 100's of MBs of pictures. It adds up.
And then there's Windows itself, which, despite all kinds of 'cleanup' options nowadays just grows bigger and bigger while in use.
512 might be enough for a Facebook user, but 256 isn't enough for anyone.
256GB SSD has been enough for me since 2009. 80G for Bootcamp and the rest for MacOS. At first, complemented with external HDDs for archival, then complemented with a MicroSD card in a flush adapter + external HDDs for archival, and then a NAS with both SMB3 for archival (documents, photos, [scuba diving] videos, etc) and timemachine, and iSCSI for the games (All the batman series, bioshock, soma and mods, HL2 and mods, Portal 1&2 and mods, L4D1&2 & mods, Tomb rider, assains creed unity, many ot
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Oh indeed it's a real pain. Fortunately my 800+GB of games fit just fine in my PC that has a 512GB SSD as a boot drive. And my girlfriend has well over 1TB of movies and pictures which she looks at on her laptop that only has 256GB SDD as the *only* storage drive.
There's no reason to keep any of that data on your boot drive. There are however many reasons why your boot drive shouldn't be a slow arse HDD, the most important of which is mental health.
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And now you're suddenly *still* paying for that 1TB spinny disk AND for the SSD that was supposed to 'replace' it.
Re:Good and 256 is just fine. (Score:5, Insightful)
Storage does matter. Even the slowest HDD is faster than anything you can store somewhere in an internet connected storage.
And it's even still available when your ISP craps out again.
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It's just as well then that all computers these days come with USB ports. There's no reason you need your "Big Data" always on your machine.
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selling someone a non-SSD boot drive really is doing your customer a disservice no matter the price.
Yeah, I would happily take a 2008 computer with an SSD over a 2020 computer with a spinning boot disk any day.
There is no amount of "savings" you could offer me to be forced to use a computer running on spinning rust.
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For some of us who use docker, or varieties of virtual machine images for building test environments, 245 GB is sparse. But makng the boot drives SSD seems quite reasonable today.
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I recently resurrected an old ThinkPad with a 64GB AlieExpress SSD. It's just enough for the system and office stuff and would be fine for your grandma's facebook machine or whatever.
On the other hand, I just bough a Chuwi Minibook X, a small Chinese laptop. For $400 it came with a 512GB SSD and 12GB of RAM. I don't think this SSD requirement, even if it happens,will be an issue.
Microsoft (Score:3)
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They already do thus I tried to install Linux alongside the Windows 10 installation on a ThinkPad it booted the first time and then after that I couldn't even get into the ThinkPad bios to change the boot order. Nothing worked until I fully deleted the Windows installation and then Linux booted just fine
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You probably had Secure Boot enabled for the Windows installation. It's a very useful feature but will get upset if you replace the bootloader with a custom one, unless you add your own keys to the UEFI storage so that it can validate it.
You can still dual boot, it's just a bit more work now because a lot of malware attacks the boot process. Or rather did attack the boot process, before Secure Boot became the norm.
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'Custom' bootloader is unlikely. If he installed Fedora or Ubuntu, the SecureBoot shouldn't blink. There was a distro I tried that didn't bother with Secureboot, but I forgot which...
However, the 'can't get into setup' might be the thing, where 'boot as fast as possible' has led some models to skip allowing keypress intervention, and you have to initiate setup from Windows, if Windows is bootable.
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It wouldn't even let me get into the BIOS, I had to remove the SSD and then I could get into the BIOS screen
Re: Microsoft (Score:2)
If you want to pull the demographic of laptop buyer this is going to affect you need to just make a version that looks and works like Windows.
More bloat? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd imagine this is only because they want to add more bloat and telemetry, and the only way to hide it from the user is to make sure the boot drive is super fast.
Don't misunderstand, SSD's are awesome, but throughout computing history, every performance gain in hardware is immediately negated with "more features" in software. That's the way MS likes it.
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I'd imagine this is only because they want to add more bloat and telemetry
Oh don't be stupid. It's 20fucking22 and it's absolutely unconscionable to sell someone a computer with a spinning HDD as a primary boot device. It is the single most slowest bottleneck for any device, and if given the choice between a 10 year old laptop with an SSD and a fast state of the art Core i7 with 64GB of RAM and windows running on a HDD you'd be quite stupid not to pick the 10 year old laptop.
Your "performance" conspiracy ship sailed back before Windows 8 was released. You'd have to be a special k
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It's probably because they want to drop support for slow boot drives and tune everything in Windows purely for SSDs. MacOS benefits from being able to do that, but Apple control the hardware. Microsoft can only influence the hardware by setting a minimum required spec.
Is Microsoft's cloud the ulterior motive? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hello,
Requiring lower-capacity storage on devices running Windows, especially laptops, seems like a good way to boost subscriptions to Microsoft's cloud-based apps and storage (Office 365, OneDrive, etc.).
Hopefully, regulators will ensure that such pushes occur in a transparent fashion so that customers have a choice of third-party services (Box, DropBox, Google, Zoho, and so forth) without having to use Microsoft's "solutions," especially since they are solving problems created by Microsoft's guidelines for reducing storage capacities in the first place.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
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Requiring lower-capacity storage
They have done nothing of the sort. On the flipside Microsoft may not like the idea that their devices look slow in comparison to competitors simply because vendors are stupid enough to sell a completely unsuitable device to consumers.
Hint: Apple doesn't ship any devices with something as archaic as a slow spinning magnetic storage for the OS, and frankly no one should.
If you need buckets of storage USB HDDs cost next to nothing and if it makes you feel any better they are just as painfully slow as they wou
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Only the cheapest, crappiest laptops have mechanical HDDs these days. All the major manufacturers don't even offer them anymore, e.g. Lenovo, Dell, HP, Asus, Acer, Huawei, NEC, Panasonic.
Good laptops have two M.2 slots for SSDs, so you can add your own cheap high capacity one.
On the desktop side there are some very small form factor PCs that lack SATA ports, but they don't have physical space for a 2.5" or 3.5" drive anyway.
USB 3.0 was already much faster than any mechanical HDD and decent even for SSDs. Yo
Cloudpushing pieces of shit. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yes because USB HDDs don't exist. It has nothing to do with HDDs being painfully slow and the single largest bottleneck which make any machine using them look like an utter turd. It's got nothing to do with their competitors having not offered a HDD as a boot drive for eons now.
No it's just a conspiracy to upsell OneDrive. Yessirree.
But hey you got your mod point for your thoughtless post, so you're happy right?
The upgrade is crazy fast (Score:3)
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Re: The upgrade is crazy fast (Score:4, Informative)
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The crazy thing is people are upvoting you for a post of complete bullshit.
In most instances a SATA 3 SSD will perform 99% as well as an NVMe drive for general Windows use.
There's an almost endless plethora of articles covering this. If you got more than 25% I'd be astounded, more like 5%
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Which may be relevant to someone considering whether to replace an existing SSD or not, but isn't particularly relevant to selecting a new device. You might as well go nvme for new device because it doesn't carry a price premium anymore and it is between a little faster and way faster, depending on your IO workload.
Re: The upgrade is crazy fast (Score:2)
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The crazy thing is how similar in magnitude the jump is when upgrading from a SATA3 SSD to a Gen 3+ NVME drive
Ceteris paribus:
Sustained read/write speed is more dependent on the Flash dies used than on the bus , so there will be not much difference between a SATA3 SSD and an NVMe SSD of the same capacity and the same brand using the same Flash chips.
Latency, on the other hand will be significantly better on an NVMe than on SATA3 all other things being equal.
So, if your workload involves many random I/O ops (like database or compile jobs) NVMe is superior, but if you watch/edit videos/photos, sata3 may be better bec
640 (Score:5, Funny)
We all know where this is headed. In a couple of years 640GB will be enough for anyone.
1 TB drives for Windows 11 Direct Storage (Score:2)
https://www.thefpsreview.com/2... [thefpsreview.com]
DirectStorage, a GPU-oriented file I/O API that should enable faster loading times and improved texture decompression speeds for PC gamers on Windows 11 (as well as Windows 10 version 1909 and up), will require an NVMe SSD with a storage capacity of 1 TB at minimum. This is according to updated specifications that Microsoft has published on its official Windows 11 page, which includes the requirements for various other new operating system features such as Auto HDR and Direc
Windows (Score:4, Informative)
Is the only OS that makes an m2 ssd feel as fast as a platter drive. Just what is it doing while it's installing updates? I can do a complete clean install of Ubuntu in the time it takes Windows to install three updates.
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Just what is it doing while it's installing updates?
Mining Dogecoins, obviously. It only adds a few minutes to each update, but multiply that by the number of Windows installs being updated at any given moment worldwide, and that's a nice little retirement plan for the Windows installer dev team :)
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Maybe (Score:2)
...debloat your OS so it CAN run on tiny cheap SSDs?
I mean, you could pull the RIAA/MPAA copy servitude bullshit and probably save a gig of drive space right there.
Once again MS is sh!tt!ng on its power users (Score:2)
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That's been true for basically ever -- everything wants to be on C:\ -- and Micros~1 is one of the worst offenders. Just try installing Visual Studio on anything other than C:\ and see how much crap ends up on C:\ anyway. Games are usually well-behaved about this, but still often store all your save games by default into "%USERPROFILE%\Saved Games" or in "%USERPROFILE%\Documents", both of which are on C:\... Basically the only way
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Every install attempts to install on the SDD even after telling it not to.
You mean system software attempts to install on the system drive as a default? Say it ain't fucking so! Oh the humanity.
Also who are you calling a power user? 512GB SSD? You keep your games on a normal HDD? That sounds like a bog standard average user to me.
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So you already seem to be using an SSD as boot volume, so you are already where they are saying to go. They said *boot* drives specifically.
No power user will be booting off of a brand new computer from HDD in 2023, even if it were 'allowed'. Since a 1TB NVMe can be had for like 70 dollars now, there's no reason to go hdd for boot volume
We've got a problem, ideas? (Score:5, Interesting)
Engineers: What if there wasn't enough space really? I mean, we could let them have a worthless 5G or so. We'll tell everyone that we're forcing SSDs for the boot drive. That will fix the problem for almost all laptops and most consumer desktops.
Microsoft: (evil grin)
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Microsoft: Too many people are dual booting Linux. How can we prevent that?
Engineers: What if there wasn't enough space really? I mean, we could let them have a worthless 5G or so. We'll tell everyone that we're forcing SSDs for the boot drive. That will fix the problem for almost all laptops and most consumer desktops.
Microsoft: (evil grin)
I dual-boot (or more correctly, bootcamp) between windows and MacOS (80GB Windows, about 170GB macOS), and 256GB (HDD since 2009 and SSD since 2012) has been enough... so...
PS: I know you are joking, i'd moderate you funny if I had mod points... ;-)
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If you're technical enough to be dual booting Windows and Linux, yet still using a HDD as your primary OS drive, go see a therapist. You have some very real mental damage that needs addressing before you become a risk to all those around you.
Also a full Linux OS install is smaller than Office 2016 so I think your boot drive will handle it just fine.
Or ... (Score:2)
uptime: 154 days
I can afford to wait for the spinning rust on rare occasions.
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Cool, so you are good with being vulnerable to the exploits found in the last few months? Some in the kernel, and even if not the kernel, the chances that a userspace update is reflected in *every* running process is not certain.
All that aside, if you buy a computer in 2023, are you saying you'd *want* your brand new computer to boot from a spinning disk, when a 1TB of SSD is as cheap as 1TB of HDD (the price gap starts to appear over 1TB)?
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Cool, so you are good with being vulnerable to the exploits found in the last few months? Some in the kernel, and even if not the kernel, the chances that a userspace update is reflected in *every* running process is not certain.
All that aside, if you buy a computer in 2023, are you saying you'd *want* your brand new computer to boot from a spinning disk, when a 1TB of SSD is as cheap as 1TB of HDD (the price gap starts to appear over 1TB)?
Please, where can I get a brand new name brand not fake 1TB SSD for U$D60 (that's the cost of a name brand brand new 1TB HDD)?
Thanks in advance.
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I guess I must be looking in all the wrong places. From my research the cost of a 1TB HD is about equivalent to a 512GB SSD. The cost of a 1TB SSD is >1.5x the cost of a 1TB HD. That is if you can replace a 2.5 or 3.5 inch HD with an m.2 SSD. If you are replacing a 2.5in HD with a 2.5in SSD the cost can almost be double when replacing a 1TB HD with a 1TB SSD.*
*This is comparing lowest cost HD with lowest cost SSD. If replacing a better quality HD with budget SSD the price difference is obviously going to
Re: Or ... (Score:2)
I can update my system, including most of the kernel, without a reboot.
Yes please (Score:2)
Do it!
Not a big deal (Score:2)
Lifespan (Score:2)
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I hope I don't jinx myself but to this point no SSD has failed and the first is at 7% of lifetime writes used. The first SSD was installed in 2014 and has 41264 Power on Hours. I have 3 now in this ma
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What is the comparable lifespan of SDDs versus HDDs these days, for those who keep machines for a long time?
Similar. Mechanical components wear out, and heads floating micrometers over a 5400RPM aluminum platter are prone to crash. Meanwhile, SSD media has a finite lifespan, which is hidden from you by wear levelling and over provision, but in cheapo drives this is not well implemented, and can present write amplification...
Remember that in the HDD world there are only 3 manufacturers (Toshiba, seagate and WD) most of them reputable (looking at you WD), and no counterfeits, meanwhile, in the Flash storage world,
Big question... (Score:2)
That's one way to get Windows to boot faster... (Score:2)
OEM price argument is a joke. (Score:2)
To say that you can't replace a 1TB HD with a 512GB SSD because the SSD would break the budget is a very bad argument. The retail cost difference between a 1TB HD and 512GB SSD is negligible and I would assume at wholesale prices the difference is even less. If you are building your computers on a budget where less than $5 difference is a make or break proposition I think you need to find some other product to produce. Replacing a 1TB HD with a 256GB SSD should actually save the company ~$10 per unit. That
Fast vs. cheap (Score:2)
I can buy a MacBook with a 2TB SSD drive. Which is a nice size for me, 1TB is a bit tight. It is wonderfully fast, 7.3GByte per second. The only problem is that it is bloody expensive.
Samsung and others offer 2TB SSD drives for a fraction of the money. Their QVO drives are slow and dirt cheap. About 500 Mbyte per second instead of 7.3GB. Still plenty fast. I don't need 2TB
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Absolute nonsense. I run a Windows 10 test system on a fairly slow HDD, and it runs perfectly fine, and doesn't go anywhere near 100% usage at any time.
The only situation where I can imagine the scenario you're describing is if your system is constantly swapping.
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If your HDD is pinned at 90-100% you got a shit-drive or something is seriously wrong with your system.
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Agreed. I think it has to do with the file indexation - that didn't really improve since Windows 7.
But you get the same issue with Gnome on Linux if you have a lot of files in your /home/username directory.
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Modern operating systems no longer optimize for spinning disks, which would involve controlling fragmentation and doing reads and writes in large chunks. Once official support for spinning boot disk is ended, OS will be able to make deeper optimizations for SSDs and clean up remaining legacy code. For example, the filesystem itself can be organized in a different way to take advantage of fast random access and reduce SSD wear.
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The implication is that their operating system does so much apparently unplanned I/O that the experience on a HDD is crap. IME this has in fact been the case since about Vista or so. Any time I have to do anything with Windows 7 on a HDD I need a cellphone game to give me something to do while I wait for it in between mouse clicks.
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"Any time I have to do anything with Windows 7 on a HDD I need a cellphone game to give me something to do while I wait for it in between mouse clicks." - Oh now, that's simply not the case. As long as you're running an i5 or i7 of any generation (even a quad core like Q6600 or above), 2GB or more of RAM, and a half way descent HDD like a WD Blue or Black, your Windows 7 experience will be just fine. An i3 (or core2 Duo) with 1GB of RAM and a cheap 5400RPM HDD, sure, then I can see it.
The processor is irrelevant. Thanks for letting me know that you don't know what you're rambling about, but it's a shame you couldn't just put that at the front of the paragraph. It's all ram and disk, literally anything dual-core that Win7 will run on is more than adequate for "anything" typical but gaming or video editing. But on a 2GB machine with a 7200 RPM HDD just waiting for it to boot and be usable is pathetic. I know this to be true because I just recently did some support work on a pair of such PC
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Ah yes, Vista...
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Competition with phones and tablets?
On one hand you have tablets, often iPads, which are kind of a larger screen competitor to a laptop and in a pretty lucrative demographic, considering the general cost of an iPad. And then there's just how much you can do with a phone anymore that doesn't require a PC at all.
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I'll trade the Win95 boot times for the size of the Win95 OS installation. Total disk usage is far more important than boot time for a disk size reduction. (For those that don't know, Win95 came on floppy disks. The total installation size being around 20 - 30 MB.)
Then you will lose the nice libraries that allow you to view/edit 4K video with HW acceleration, those sweet machine learning libraries, your very rich IDEs, all that raytracing and upscaling goodness in your games... your 64bit OS with the inflated executables... All that functionality uses disk space...
Even the linux kernel and distros have grown in size over the years, and not all is Pottering's fault...
And if you want to customize Windows to only load the libraries and stuff you need, take a look at Win